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An anonymous reader writes "The Danish amateur rocket group Copenhagen Suborbitals are readying to test their Launch Escape System for the Tycho Deep Space capsule in the Baltic Sea east of the island Bornholm Sunday 12th August. Live coverage can be found at rocketfriends.org, livestream.com, Wired's Rocket Shop and raketvenner.dk. Live transmissions are expected from 8 am localtime (UTC+2). Live transmissions, audio commentary as well as VHF audio are expected to be available. The Tycho Deep Space is the intended capsule for a later planned suborbital shoot to the edge of Space led by Peter Madsen and Christian von Bengtson."

Buzz Aldrin wrote about a proposed "Apollo II" (read that as "Apollo Two") capsule that was kicked around the office inside of the NASA astronaut corps for a little while. That basic idea is pretty much what Orion has turned into, although the original proposal was to merely expand the Apollo capsule that could still fit on top of an Apollo service module.

The one impressive thing with Copenhagen Suborbital isn't necessarily the cutting edge technology, but rather the incredible low-cost approach they are taking for its development and using largely donations and donated labor to build everything. The comparison is much better made against Armadillo Aerospace, other than the fact they don't have a fairy god-millionaire who is helping them out to sponsor their vehicle development. But they do have Kickstarter and a huge fan base that kind of makes up for that missing part of the picture.

Regardless of anything else you may think about this rocket, they are "bending metal" and sending stuff into the air as well as the fact they already have several launches under their belt to demonstrate at least some level of competence for sending stuff up with this technology. It isn't necessarily what Copenhagen Suborbital has done in terms of being compared to national space programs, but rather that they are doing anything at all and certainly in comparison to other amateur/semi-professional groups working on a shoestring budget they are as far along doing real spaceflight as anybody else in the world.

There are a few retired NASA (and apparently ESA) engineers working in Copenhagen Suborbital as well, so the technical skill of those involved is pretty high and they do know what they are doing.